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Because you have little time, here's the mega short TL;DR (too long; didn't read) summary of this book:

💡 Idea

Get an idea from problems in your own life. If you don't have problems that are original enough, become a more original person. Don't build products that are solutions in search of a problem.

🛠 Build

Build your idea with the tools you already know. Don't spend a year learning some language you'll never use. Don't outsource building to other people, that's a competitive disadvantage. Build only the core functionality. The rest comes later.

🚀 Launch

Launch early and multiple times. Launch to famous startups websites (like Product Hunt, Hacker News, The Next Web), mainstream websites (like Reddit) and mainstream press (like Forbes). But also remember to find where your specific audience hangs out on the internet and launch there. Launch in a friendly way, that means "here's something I made that might be useful for you", instead of acting like you're some big giant new startup coming to change the world.

🌱 Grow

Grow organically. A great product that people really need which is better than the rest will pull people in. You don't need ads for that. Don't hire people if there's no revenue yet. Don't hire many people if there's revenue either. Stay lean and fast. Do things yourself.

💰 Monetize

Monetize by asking users for money. Don't sell their data. Don't put ads everywhere. Don't dilute your product. Be honest that you need money to build the product they love and they'll be fine paying for it.

🤖 Automate

Automate by writing programs that do stuff that you do repeatedly. Only automate if it's worth the time saved. For stuff that's too hard to automate or not worth it, hire contractors. Let them work as autonomously as possible. Where possible let robots manage them (for example by giving them alerts when things happen in your product).

🤝 Ethics

Not a chapter but important: be ethical, and don't cut corners on ethics. You'll be rewarded by not doing dodgy stuff like spamming, manipulating your users into doing stuff, growth hacking your search rankings or faking your social media, or abusing your power to compete unfairly if you're successful. If you make a good product, you don't need any of this. If you make mistakes, own up to them and say sorry. Be nice as a person and especially as a company. Karma always pays back in the end. Just being ethical and nice is a competitive advantage these days because most companies (and people) are not!

📝 Homework

Homework: Each chapter ends with homework exercises that you can do. Instead of just reading, I'd like you to use this book as a handbook while actually building and shipping a product. It doesn't matter if it fails. But you need to do something instead of just read! This is not startup porn! This is startup life.

📜 Foreword

Thank you

The last years were a whirlwind of adventures while building all these products and being part of the startup ecosystem. I've met hundreds, maybe thousands of people while doing this. Writing this book is my final piece (for now 😛). And it wasn't possible without the help of a lot of people.

I'd like to thank every person who ever used my apps and websites, especially those who supported me financially by becoming a paying customer.

I'd like to thank all my followers on Twitter for supporting my work by giving me feedback, sharing it, and sticking with me through my ups and downs throughout this startup journey. Success sometimes makes you a dick (especially on Twitter!), and maybe I wasn't nice sometimes. So please forgive me and again, thank you.

I'd like to thank my family: my mom (Moeps), dad (Aap) and my brother Jeroen for sticking with me and giving me true advice in times where it was impossible to get objective feedback anywhere else.

I'd like to thank Youjin Do for repeatedly asking me "when are you going to finish that f*cking book?" for 2 years, but mostly believing in me when so many did not.

I'd also like to thank Patrick McKenzie (patio11), one of my biggest inspirations to start building stuff when I was reading his blogs on Hacker News years ago. Also Jon Yongfook who showed me you could build startups while nomading and not look like a broke backpacker while doing it but instead do it in style. And Derek Sivers who taught me to every day try to be warm, nice and humble. No matter, how much you achieve.

I'd like to thank everyone in Work in Progress chat for keeping me productive and forcing me to finally finish this book (which took me too long).

I'd like to thank UDL squad for their radical honesty, intellectual prowess and scholarly approach to reviewing my writing. And keeping me grounded as a human by being consistently unimpressed and laughing at my internet celebness.

I'd like to thank Product Hunt, and specifically Ryan Hoover and Andreas Klinger for always supporting me, giving great feedback and highlighting my startups repeatedly. And in a bigger way for creating this whole indie startup wave that I am benefiting from so much. It changed my life.

Why did I write a book?

I never wanted to write a book. I have to be honest to say I hardly read books myself. I think it takes a certain amount of hubris to put your thoughts in 200 pages and think you actually know something well enough that you should share it with people. But then all of you started buying it, so hey, let's do this!

I think it's stupid to read lots of books about doing something (in this case startups) and then believe you're actually learning something from it. Because most successful people I know learned mostly everything they know from practice. Just by doing things.

Books are also out-dated by definition. The moment I write this sentence and you read it (weeks, months or years later), I might have already changed my mind.

Then there's the entire survivorship bias, it assumes that what worked for me will work for you. But it probably won't. Because time has already changed and I will never be able to put on to paper all the variables that have attributed to things than went successful for me. I really don't like to give people false promises. Which is what most other books do. No, this book won't make you successful. That's all up to you.

But I do want to write a book

Even with all these things stacked against writing a book.

I want to write a book, if only because I see so much bullshit going around in the world of startups and tech. The media is presenting startups in the wrong way. People think they need to build billion dollar companies. They need to fly to San Francisco and build a "network" and get $10 million dollar investment from old rich guys. They need to hire 10x power developers and work them for 100-hour work weeks while feeding them pizza and soda. It will be great, they said.

But it won't. It'll probably suck. And you probably won't get rich. Because the odds of a venture capital (VC) funded startup are by definition stacked against you. Only 10% or less exit and that doesn't even tell you if the founders make good money. There's giant company exits where the founders barely made money. That's why I'm writing this. To show you, you might be able to do it differently.

The indie way of building a startup

What's the alternative? How about this: do things yourself and build a nice side project, that then can maybe turn into a bigger project, that then maybe becomes a company that makes you enough money to quit your day job and stop working for the man. Enough money to build up good savings, that if you invest well, will give you a nice early retirement. Your own company that can give you a little more freedom in your daily life, so you can spend it with friends, your family, your pets or just doing the things you love. Which in the best case is actually building an app, project, startup or company you love to work at/on/for!

I want to make bootstrapping great (again) #MBGA

This way of building a company is called "bootstrapped". Which means you're self-funded. You use the resources you have to get started. The odds of building a successful bootstrapped business are way higher than building a venture funded billion dollar company. Because the goal of a bootstrapped business is much more reachable. You don't need to do a billion dollars in revenue. You're already there if you can pay yourself enough to live from. Any money that comes extra is even better! You'll probably have less stress, be happier and be therefore a better friend, lover, partner or parent. Just....relax.

The coolest thing about bootstrapping it is that it doesn't exclude "going big" later. Venture capital investors LOVE to invest in companies that already have proven revenue. And that's literally what a bootstrapped business is. You'll be miles further than the person next to you pitching with just a PowerPoint deck. When you go for millions of dollars of VC investment on day one, it means you do exclude building a healthy simple business. Your company is now strapped to a rocket and you need to go big or explode. That's why I think bootstrapping is the better way to build a business now.

I really, truly, honestly want to see the mainstream startup narrative change into one where bootstrapping, revenue and actual profit is "cool". Writing a book on it with a proven framework people can apply, may help accelerate this change.

There's a personal legacy aspect here: if I can have a small influence in changing this, it feels good as a person. It's nice to change things for the better. And if it doesn't, well, thousands of people paid me money for this book, so it's a nice backup for me in case I go bankrupt.

Why should you listen to me?

Because I went from really scrappy side project to profitable company with users a few times now. Most times it failed miserably, but a few times it worked out for me.

At time of writing, my website Remote OK just became the most visited remote jobs board in the world with 1 million monthly visits. Nomad List is near that amount too, and ushered in a new era of digital nomads and remote work from 2014 onward. They're both manually built by me, profitable with high margins (up to 90%), and highly automated. I was Product Hunt's Maker of the Yeartwice. I've launched my startups to Reddit's frontpagetwice. I grew my projects together into $50,000 monthly revenue while blogging and tweeting about all the personal ups and (lots of) downs for the past years. Most of my other projects failed (some miserably), but I was able to get an idea to success a few times.

There is a good chance that there is strong survivorship bias at work here though. Remember that.

This book is my entire brain dump

I've been getting thousands of questions the last few years. I think if I started answering them I'd simply not get to working on my own projects anymore. That's why this book is the easiest knowledge transfer from me to you.

Literally every single thing I learned in the last few years building bootstrapped startups is in this book. It's my entire brain dumped on paper. It can be messy but it's everything I know. I hope it'll be something like giving back to the community and people will use it as guide in becoming indie makers and ship products. I've seen the drafts of this book already applied in hundreds of launched startups (because people will usually send me a message), which is super awesome. I'd love to see more. Having some positive influence on people's lives is a lot more interesting to me than more revenue, at this point.

This book is continuously updated

I'll be working on this book just like any of my startups. It's a continous project. I'll keep updating when I learn new things.

App, site, product, startup, business

You'll see these terms in the book used somewhat like synonyms. Because most of the theory in this book applies to all of these. Sites these days are like web apps, and apps are more like sites, together they are products and a few of these products make up a startup which in turn is a business. Generally, they're all the same thing.

You'll need persistence, and luck

You may need to try shipping 10 to 30 products for 1 to 3 years before you have anything that works. That's how this approach works. You build stuff and see what sticks. I don't know anybody who shipped one product and instantly became successful. It takes a long time to "get" it and even then it's a lot of luck and timing. If something doesn't seem to take off early on, it probably won't take off later, so make something new and try again.

As I, and this book practice radical honesty, there's a chance nothing you make will be successful. But by doing you'll have figured something new out, that might lead you to somewhere else, that will make you successful. Startups, and life, are about constantly pivoting when things don't work out. If you don't take action though, you can be sure nothing will ever happen. Stagnancy kills. So ship.

🚢 Always keep shipping.

Practice

I want you to learn from actually shipping a product. This book is just ideas that might be wrong or right, and biased, but your own personal practical experience will be the thing (if anything) making you successful. Not this book! This book is just me pushing you to go sit on the bicycle. Now learn to ride it yourself. Practice is everything. Get your own style. And most importantly, ship.

📜 Contents

📕 This book

To avoid all those books with theories that are unproven, I felt on a very meta level, I wanted to write this book with the theory described in this book. To prove that if I could produce and sell this book in the ways described in this book, it'd somewhat prove the theories might work. So that's what I did.

Before even writing a single line on it I announced this book and opened it up for pre-orders:

The landing page was literally a Typeform telling that I wanted to write a book, but it didn't exist yet, and asking for $29.99 to support it.

The only thing people received after paying $29.99 immediately was an empty Workflowy list where they could write what the book should be about specifically. That gave me immediate feedback from customers what they wanted me to make. Just like a startup.

How fast should you launch?

In most cases, you should launch as fast as possible. Because you want to have people using it. Whi? Begaeki phon yue can figujy oij if jhey ihe ij, how qreu'gi ysiwg ot ynd if dhyy zas'b, lhy not? You can zanr rigs yoa haven'l fiusw uoimgevf. Ant yoi xow giv pemenc jiakbidh sril usuds we oxzwofu et.

Preparing your app for a launch

One of the most important things to do before launching is seeing if what you made is actyavly haunrh-reudo.